Three Tales Of Another Microcosm

CURATORIAL NOTE

Fantastical tales that epic and science fiction narratives project into lands far, far away are larger than life shadows springing from sublime/abject corners of our present. Slipping through the interstices in eternal heterotopias that weave hegemonic histories of civilizational glory and tragedy are senses of time and space that are absent from their grand narratives. Moving away from tales testified by libraries, museums and scientific research, this exhibition is a withdrawal into microcosms that reside in our terrestrial realities, flushing us down a rabbit hole for encounters mediated by the artists’ magnifying glass.The three artists presented here carve otherworldly spaces of abjection and allegoryupon which the viewer is able to project their own regressions —those sentiments that we are only able to project on to what we perceive to be alien to our identities— and in their narrative emancipate their ‘subject’ into sublime terrains.  Minal Damani takes us down the drain, quite literally, tracing the journey of debris from mucky gutters into the deep blue sea, and the universes they occupy. We are the sky, and our bodily refuse such as strands of hair that escape our corporeality return to the sky.The interconnectedness of all organic material surfaces in her narrative.Recognizable strands of hair morph into glutinous bursts of colour, almost as if they had been endowed deliverance from menial corners. This series is an extension of Damani’s ongoing articulation of the intangible ‘self’ through its environment. Hair, an extension of our physicality coalesces into line in her drawings, dividing and uniting at the same time, breaking down but also integrating with the life-source that is water and the sky, even as it passes through drainpipes filled with other urban and human refuse. The pieces of broken tile are also venerated for their endurance from the margins, from their location as one with the underbelly of more esteemed transactions between animate and inanimate realms. They assume metaphors of reliability and fragility, from the ignominious place of burden that they were relegated to by architectural purpose. 

This preoccupation with mythologies ofmaterial vestiges opens up to Vineha Sharma’s formal inquires. If we were to imagine an aesthetic for time, that too lost time, what would it be? Working with her own memories, especially those that are non-extraordinary, and the phenomenology of undocumented time, the artist invents a visual language that can salvage their imprints. She meticulously constructs an iconology for memories, intuitive perceptions and lost moments. Inspired by the non-realism of forms in traditional arts and craft, her universe consists of humanoid figures that remind one of the likeness with which we have inscribed mythologies of worlds other than our own. The estrangement provoked by her visual language further reinforces the exclusion and otherness that aspects of our realities assume in our collective consciousness, including moments of transcendence or questions regarding life after death.   This archeological enterprise of excavating from the fringesof historical time yields to D. Priyanka’s concern with epistemological frameworks that dictate our understanding of the universe and life forms. If we made gods in our own image, how do we imagine life on planets that are light-years away from us? In the fictional hybrid galaxy of Lainika — which is of her own invention — she orchestrates a meticulous simulation of the semiotics and epistemes that have come to dictate scientific studies of planet Earth. The artist is more concerned with the simple forms of life from which complex organisms have emerged such as algae and lichens, reminding us of the need to climb down the evolutionary ladder to basic DNA structures to derive methodologies that can decode human biology. This self-conscious process mirrors limiting empirical frameworks that prescribe our experience and consequentlyunravels the structural logic that is implicit in our everyday lives through mythologies of an elsewhere. 

The minor narratives of these artists are a point of entry tothemes that have universal resonances and yet permeate immediate realities in unassuming ways. These three tales of another microcosm is a schism seeking transcendence in the unexceptional in a world that makes icons and heroes only from exceptional time and space. These are spectacles shunned from spectacular tales that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we do.

• Text by Anushka Rajendran